Writing.Com General Discussion

Here's one approach:

Make an outline.

Start with 3 bullets to represent the 3 act play model of Intro, Setback, Climax. That's super summarized.

On the Intro act, make sub bullets for introducing your character(s), showing them be competent, then introduce the story problem (aka Inciting Incident).

In the Setback act, the hero pursue the goal/problem and has one or more challenges and setbacks.

In the Climax act, this is the comeback, there's a training montage, the hero figures out a solution, and goes to fight the end boss. Followed by the closing scene where everything is sort of back to normal.

That's a super generic process. You'll have to adapt it.

Also consider that within an act, to use the Scene and Sequel model. This means that you start with a Scene, and the next bullet is a Sequel. You can google "Scene and Sequel" up. The Sequel is a reactionary scene where the hero contemplates what just happened in the previous Scene (note the capital S), how they feel about it, and what they could do next.

To give you a sense of scale, I recently finished the first draft of my novel at 77,000 words. In order to diagnose plot issues, I built a new outline based on what I actually wrote (side lesson, your story will not follow the outline perfectly, but it is easier to know where you think you are going).

As I was trying to go over broad strokes, hoping for 10 bullets, I got 38 bullets on "what happens next" by listing the major events/scenes.

If you do the outline process, to get a novel, you should have more than 10 bullets. Because odds are good, any single bullet can be written in a paragraph to a page. So it's going to take a lot of bullets to get to novel-length sizing.

I don't think your outline has to be super detailed, but getting to novel-length requires having enough material and arranging it in a story structure.